Our Arklahoma heritage: A Cherokee County woman became the international face of Dust Bowl-era depression

The Dust Bowl and the Depression turned whole stretches of the southern plains into places where the land itself seemed to have given up. Dust storms buried fences and livestock, crops failed year after year, banks took the farms, and families already scraping by on tenant shares or small holdings watched the soil blow away and the credit dry up.

California looked like the place that might still hold work. Handbills and word of mouth spoke of fruit, cotton, vegetables, and wages that could keep a household fed. So they loaded what they could into cars and trucks and pointed west on the roads that later became Route 66, hundreds of thousands of them, carrying the hope that the Golden State would be kinder than the country they were leaving.

Florence Leona Christie was born on September 1, 1903, in Indian Territory, what would become Oklahoma, into a Cherokee family that farmed on a modest scale near Tahlequah. Her father left early. Her mother later remarried, and the household stayed close to the land.

At seventeen, she married Cleo Owens, a farmer’s son from Missouri. Children came quickly. Violet arrived first, then Viola, then a son they called Leroy or Troy, and more after that. The young family moved west with some of the Owens kin to the Sacramento Valley around Oroville, where there was mill work and farm work.

Florence was pregnant with their sixth child when Cleo died of tuberculosis in 1931. She was twenty-eight, a widow with six children to feed.

She took whatever work she could find, picking cotton and other crops by day and cleaning or cooking in restaurants by night. In 1933 she had another child. For a time she returned to Oklahoma, then came back to California with her parents, settling near Shafter in the San Joaquin Valley.

She took up with Jim Hill. By March 1936 she was thirty-two and the mother of seven. That month a late freeze ruined the pea crop around Nipomo. Thousands of pickers who had come for the work found themselves stranded with nothing to harvest. Florence and her family had been heading toward lettuce work farther north when their car broke down

They pulled into the camp. Hill and a couple of the older boys went looking for a way to fix the radiator. Florence stayed in a lean-to with the younger children.

Dorothea Lange, working for the Resettlement Administration, stopped at the camp on her way home and took a series of photographs. One of them showed Florence seated, two children turned into her sides, a baby in her lap, her face lined and her eyes fixed somewhere past the camera.

The caption that traveled with the picture read, “Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California.” Lange later wrote that Florence told her they had been living on frozen vegetables from the fields and birds the children managed to kill, and that she had sold the tires off the car for food.

Family members later disputed some of those details and said the tires were still on the car, but the photograph itself became one of the defining images of the era.

After Nipomo the family kept moving with the crops. Florence had three more children with Hill. She eventually married George B. Thompson, a hospital administrator, and the household settled near Modesto. The children grew up, worked, and later bought her a house.

She preferred the mobility of a trailer and moved back into one. In 1983, after a stroke, she had no savings for medical care. Her children, by then numbering ten in all, made a public appeal that brought in donations and letters from strangers who recognized the face from the old photograph.

Florence Owens Thompson died on September 16, 1983, at age 80 in Scotts Valley, California (at her son’s home), from a stroke, cancer, and heart problems. Her family had publicly appealed for help with medical costs in late August; donations totaling roughly $25,000–$35,000 came in.

She was buried in Lakewood Memorial Park in Hughson, California (Stanislaus County, near Modesto), in the Peacevale Garden section, next to her husband George B. Thompson (who had died in 1974).

What stayed with her children was less the fame of the picture than the ordinary fact that she had kept them fed and together through years when the only certainty was the next crop and the next town.

One of them said she gave them a sense that nobody owed them anything.

The same storms and the same empty fields that pushed so many other families onto the road had pushed hers as well. California was the place they reached, and the place where they stayed.